News in brief

12:01AM GMT 29 Jan 2005

Car munitions discovery closes Channel Tunnel

Thousands of travellers were delayed yesterday after the Channel Tunnel was closed in a bomb scare.

Munitions were found in a car at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone as it was about to be driven on to the 5pm shuttle to France. The terminal was evacuated and a 300-yard cordon thrown around the building as Kent Police and an Army bomb disposal team investigated the British-registered car.

The discovery of the munitions, from the First or Second World Wars, resulted in the tunnel being closed for three and a half hours, disrupting its busiest night of the week.

Ten scheduled services were held up and five Eurostar trains were prevented from leaving. Trains coming from France were allowed to finish their journeys if close enough to Folkestone. Others in the tunnel reversed to Calais.

Eurotunnel said last night: "It looks as if we were dealing with someone with a rather strange penchant for war memorabilia."

Police carried out a controlled explosion.

Drink-drive police chief banned

Chief Insp Bruce Clarke, 49, a member of the South Wales force's roads policing unit, was arrested during the campaign after his car hit a crash barrier. He was banned from driving for 20 months and fined £600. He has taken early retirement.

Queen takes commuter train

The Queen took a commuter train to an engagement and insisted that other passengers could share the carriage she was in if they had to stand.

She boarded the scheduled 10am fast service from King's Lynn, near Sandringham, to London for the Holocaust Day memorial service on Thursday. Jane Walker, a magazine editor, said a policeman in her carriage told passengers that Her Majesty did not want anyone to stand on her account. No one took up the offer.

Earlier this week the National Audit Office criticised the Duke of York for racking up a £325,000 bill for a year's travel by plane and helicopter.

Britons hide their work errors

The British are far more likely to hide workplace errors from their employers than their counterparts in other countries, new research has shown.

Workers in Britain are more inclined to hope mistakes go unnoticed. The most common errors included sending sensitive e-mails to the wrong person, forgetting deadlines, giving the wrong information to clients and not putting the correct numbers of zeros on figures.

Cannabis arrests fall by 25,000

Arrests for possession of cannabis have fallen by about a third in England and Wales since the drug was downgraded a year ago, according to Home Office figures released yesterday.

The decision to move cannabis from Class B to Class C saved an estimated 199,000 hours of police time which had been spent on post-arrest paperwork. Other Home Office figures, from the British Crime Survey, showed that the re-classification in January last year had little effect on the number of young people aged between 16 and 24 who admitted using the drug in the year to April 2004.

The Home Office estimated there were 24,875 fewer arrests in the year since reclassification.